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I am more familiar with Bayesian than frequentist stats, but given that they are mathematically equivalent, shouldn't frequentist stats have an answer to e.g. t
by HawtAds 7mo ago
I am more familiar with Bayesian than frequentist stats, but given that they are mathematically equivalent, shouldn't frequentist stats have an answer to e.g. the loss function of a VAE? Or are generative machine learning inherently impossible to model for frequentist stats?
Though if you think about it, a diffusion model is somewhat (partially) frequentist.
- jmalicki 7mo agoThey do! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18777 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18777 But that doesn't mean a frequentist views a VAE as a generative model! Putting it another way, Gaussian processes originated as a frequentist technique! But to a frequentist they are not generative.
- HawtAds 7mo agoOoh good find, thanks for the link. This will be my bedtime reading for this week :)
- jmalicki 7mo agoI guess you have me thinking more... things like Parzen window estimators or other KDEs are frequentist... But while it's a probability distribution, to a frequentist they are estimating the fixed parameters of a distribution. The distribution isn't generative, it just represents uncertainty - and I think that's a bit of the deep core philosophical divide between frequentists and Bayesians - you might use all the same math, but you cannot possibly think of it as being generative.